I agree wholeheartedly that Adam Phillips' writings on psychology are first-rate. "There is not going to be any consensus inside us ..." tells us that sometimes our kindnesses may be desperate and sometimes we may be able to see through out own feeble strategies. We can choose. To say that Phillips is insensitive to "caritas" is just weird. He's just saying that our kindness-giving is a complex operation, and made even more densely problematic by history. But here's what I don't get: Why does Phillips, who can see so clearly how conflicted our psyches are, think our social structures (politics etc) don't have the same built-in features? Why the distaste for capitalism as if it were more cruel than socialism? Are his country's National Health policies "kinder" to people, even if the quality suffers?